September 14th, 2057: Hagerstown, Maryland

Thanks goodness we’re all safe. Our home is underwater and we may never be able to return, but we’re together and safe. We were able to get one bag of luggage each onto the evacuation bus and we’ve been stuck in a shelter for two weeks, but at least it’s one that’s well above sea level. As a hydrologist, I knew how vulnerable D.C. was. I should have moved my family to high ground years ago.

Sea levels have risen ten meters since the turn of the century due to the collapse of the South Greenland Ice Sheet and the melting in Antartica . The base of the Washington Monument is now at sea level. As a senior hydrologist with the Army Corps of Engineers I was involved in writing the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the sea walls. Never has a project gone through the process so quickly. Entire neighborhoods were sacrificed since they were near sea level before. The Potomac now looks more like a delta than a river and we knew if we tried to keep it to its old path, we would lose the entire city. Then again, we lost the city anyway. Given that most of the residents displaced were African-American and most of the people making the decisions were of European heritage, it looked ugly. And it was. Our mission was to protect the halls of power and the historical landmarks, not homes. While we were putting together the plan, we all knew that a hurricane hitting near high tide would overwhelm the city’s defenses. We also knew that it was only a matter of time before that happened. As the frequency and intensity of storms increased, we realized that we had under-built the system. In retrospect I think that if we knew that a category 4 hurricane was going to come within thirty miles of D.C. in 2057, we might have just recommended abandoning the city. There’s no way we could have prepared for Hurricane Rodolfo. The rains came in so heavy and the sea level was at the height of the walls. We couldn’t pump the water out, for there was nowhere for it to go. For five hours the rain poured in, while the wind pushed the water over the walls, until some of them failed. Luckily the forecast was accurate and the call to evacuate came in time. We took the Metro to Shady Grove where a bus met us. We didn’t know where it was going and we didn’t really care. I don’t think the bus driver knew at first either. We’re in the gym of the North Hagerstown High School in Hagerstown, Maryland. The locals have been wonderful, making sure we all are fed and safe. My kids are even taking classes here, which is great since if they were just sitting here, they’d be as worried as I am. The classes and new kids are a great distraction.

I’ve been emailing my boss at the Army Corps. He’s in a center like this in Virginia and doesn’t know anything more than what’s in the news: Congress has moved to Philadelphia; the President is at an “undisclosed secure location”, the Supreme Court isn’t in session; the Departments are all moving to whatever field office their Secretary thinks is best. The Army Corps headquarters is moving to Atlanta, but that doesn’t mean our jobs are.

The ridiculousness of working on EIS is now embarrassingly clear. The process was fine at protecting a site, but totally ignored the damage we were doing as a society to the whole system. It was as if Al Capone were arrested for tax evasion not because that was what they could prove, but because murder was actually legal. This was a problem that the Corp knew about 50 years ago when the Gateway Pacific coal export terminal in Washington State applied for permits. Our biggest disagreement with the officials in Washington State was scope. The state wanted to include all environmental impacts, including coal dust coming off the trains, traffic delays, the chance of a maritime accident in the Puget Sound, and the impact of burning the coal in China or wherever the coal ended up. The Army Corps’ approach was that only the impacts near the terminal were in scope: the trains could spew coal dust and tie up traffic; burning the coal could introduce enormous amounts of CO2 and mercury into the air. The Corp felt that that none of those impacts were appropriate for us to question. We said those issues were better dealt with through other means. The state argued that those other means didn’t exist: if they weren’t in scope here, no one would consider them. The terminal ended up getting a federal permit, but not the state one, which killed the project.

I suspect my job at the Army Corps is over. I feel like a typewriter repair technician in 1990: I’ve realized that environmental impact statements are going to disappear. If a project passes the laugh test and it helps us manage rising sea levels and other impacts from climate change, it will get built. In D.C. we barely paid any attention to the process, but it did delay construction by a few months. If we started earlier, would we have gotten enough built to save the city? I doubt it, but maybe. It also might have been worse: maybe they would have tried to protect the entire city and keep the Potomac in its old channel, which would have failed in a big storm years ago. I’ll give the Army Corps a few more days and then we head to Chicago. My brother there has offered to put us up until we figure out what’s next for us.